On Chinese, European & American Universities

http://www.redorbit.com/news/education/1526725/on_chinese_european__american_universities/index.html

On Chinese, European & American Universities

Posted on: Tuesday, 19 August 2008

By Kirby, William C

In North America and in Europe, the past three decades have seen an
unprecedented expansion of higher education and, in the most recent
time, efforts at reform and restructuring.1 My own university,
Harvard, has overhauled its undergraduate curriculum in a
comprehensive fashion for the first time in thirty years. European
universities have witnessed even more thoroughgoing changes in the
structure of undergraduate education.

But perhaps nowhere on earth have recent decades seen more revolutionary change in higher education
than in the People's Republic of China. Thirty years ago, Chinese
universities were just reopening after the catastrophe of the Cultural
Revolution. Today they are poised for positions of international
leadership in research and education.

The case of Wuhan University, arguably China's oldest modern university, illustrates the dramatic
changes the Chinese system of higher education has undergone in the
past century. Wuhan and the surrounding province of Hubei have long
been important centers of commerce, scholarship, and political
leadership. It was the great reforming Governor-General Zhang Zhidong,
who founded in 1893 - five years before Peking University began - the
"Self-Strengthening Institute" that would become Wuhan University.
That university would be a witness to central events of China's
twentieth century: it was in Wuhan that the revolution that overthrew
the Qing dynasty in 1912 began; Wuhan hosted one of the two contending
Nationalist governments in 1927, and the retreating government of
Chiang Kaishek in 1938. In the early People's Republic, Wuhan became a
great industrial sector. Today, western Hubei, upriver from Wuhan, is
home to the largest engineering project in world history, the Three
Gorges Dam (and even a "Three Gorges Dam University").

Wuhan University had a strong history of growth before 1949. It was
then nearly destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Today it is a
great, comprehensive university, with a faculty of nearly 3,500,
teaching a student body of 30,000 undergraduates and 17,000 graduate
students; it confers doctoral degrees in 143 subjects - more than
Harvard University offers.

Wuhan University's renewal and expansion is part of a much larger
story of contemporary higher education in China. For China is
experiencing a revolution in mass higher education that dwarfs that of
the United States in the 1950s and that of Europe in the 1970s. This
is a revolution that began in the final years of the twentieth century
and is still gathering strength.

This is not the first educational revolution in modern China. A little
more than a century ago, China underwent a similar, perhaps even more
seismic shift in educational institutions, when, with the end of the
old examination system, the existing structure of local schools,
academies, and directorates of study - all linked to the civil service
exams - was displaced by a new system of public and private
institutions.

At that time, China developed one of the more dynamic systems of
higher education in the world, with strong, state-run institutions
(Peking University, Jiao Tong University, National Central University,
and at the apogee of research, the Academia Sinica), accompanied by a
creative set of private colleges and universities (Yenching
University, St. John's University, and Peking Union Medical College,
to name but a few). Sadly, all this would be swept away in the late
1950s and 1960s, yet the traditions and memories of excellence
remained, and they have helped to fuel more recent efforts.

Simply in terms of numbers of students educated, the more recent
changes are more dramatic than even the great postwar expansion in the
United States or the growth of mass-enrollment universities in Europe
in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1978, after a decade of mostly closed
universities, Chinese universities enrolled approximately 860,000
students. This number increased very gradually until 1996, with
enrollment then of about one million. In the late 1990s the government
decided to accelerate greatly the pace of expansion, and by the year
2000 as many as six million students were enrolled in Chinese
universities.

In the seven years since then, the overall official numbers - counting
all kinds of institutions - have risen dramatically. According to the
ambitious Eleventh Five-Year Plan of the Ministry of Education,
higher-education enrollment was scheduled to reach twenty-three
million by 2005 and thirty million by 2010. There are at present more
than twentysix million students in institutions of higher learning. By
contrast, the United States had approximately thirteen million
undergraduate and two million graduate and professional students in
2000, with undergraduates projected to rise to perhaps fifteen million
by 2010.

China clearly is moving toward mass higher education. The gross
enrollment ratio of eighteen to twenty-one year olds is presently set
to be at 15 percent, having been in the low single digits for most of
the history of the People's Republic. By 2020, China aims to enroll as
much as 40 percent of young adults in colleges or universities.

A once-small teachers' college in Shantung province, Lin Yi Normal
University had 3,500 students in the year 2000. It now has 35,000.
This growth is clear not only in public universities but in the
rapidly growing number of private universities. Outside the ancient
city of Xi'an, Xi'an International University (Xi'an waishi xueyuan)
did not exist fifteen years ago; today it has 36,000 students. To put
it in another light, that of physical space, the 'square meterage' of
Chinese universities has more than tripled in the past seven years. In
the realm of graduate study, China now turns out, annually, more PhDs
than any other country in the world.

Unlike the American expansion of the 1950s and the European growth of
the 1970s, this growth has elements that are also self- consciously
elitist, with the aim of building a significant number of world-class
universities. These are defined in China as being cradles of
highlevel, creative researchers; frontiers of scientific research;
forces capable of transforming research and innovation into higher
productivity; and bridges for international and cultural exchange. To
that end the Chinese government and many other sources are providing
enormous revenues to the leading institutions. Individual winners of
recent competitions among universities have been each given several
hundred million dollars to expend over the next five years; and
runners-up have received funds equivalent to those given to winners in
recent European competitions.

Beyond this, the leading Chinese universities have tapped private,
philanthropic, and foundation sources for substantial streams of
income. Like leading American state universities, such as the
University of California at Berkeley, or the University of Michigan,
the most prominent Chinese universities know that they will soon be in
a position where only a quarter or less of their budget will come from
the state; the rest will have to be raised elsewhere. However these
budgets are put together, it seems certain that within ten years the
research budgets of China's leading universities will approach those
of leading American and European universities, and that in the realms
of engineering and science, Chinese universities will be among the
world's leaders.

This is a welcome challenge to American universities - a challenge for
both competition and cooperation. Although in the latter part of the
twentieth century, American universities were, as a group, among the
strongest in the world, there is no reason to imagine that this is a
permanent condition. After all, about a century ago -just when China
was abandoning the ancient examination system that as late as the
eighteenth century had helped to make China (at least in the West) an
ideal of educated, enlightened leadership - almost all of the leading
universities in the world were German, based on the great
nineteenth-century reforms of German higher education. Yet, now, at
least according to a recent ranking of universities worldwide by
Shanghai Jiao Tong University - a ranking taken seriously by deans and
presidents the world over - German universities do not dominate.
Indeed, according to the Shanghai rankings, not one of the top fifty
was German.

There is a real silliness to this rankings game. What is ranked often
has little to do with education, as distinct from research. One
criterion, citation indexes, varies in value depending on the
discipline : they are extremely important in economics and much less
useful in history; helpful in chemistry and chemical biology, and
without any merit whatsoever in Celtic. All of the international
rankings also focus on research prizes, such as the Nobel Prize, and
universities glory in having on their faculty Nobel laureates, taking
credit, in these rankings, for these noble scholars, even though the
work that gained them a Nobel Prize may have been given for work done
decades earlier, and at another universify. Even those who try to
measure the quality of undergraduate education often use
student/teacher ratio, which is an inadequate way of assessing
comparatively successful teaching.

But the broader point in this discussion of rankings is that nothing
is permanent in the world of learning. All of us have progressed by
learning from one another. Take again the case of Harvard. Harvard was
founded in 1636, that is, in the late Ming dynasty. It is a measure of
Harvard's parochialism that no one in Cambridge, Massachusetts, knew
that. Harvard was founded in a cultural and economic backwater of a
Europe that was itself 'underdeveloped' in comparison to either the
Ming or early Qing. Harvard became a decent college by copying the
norms of British institutions, but even those could hardly compare
with the sophisticated Confucian learning of the great Donglin Academy
and other institutions of the late Ming and early Qing. It grew to
become a university worthy of the name only in the late nineteenth
century by copying the policies and priorities of the great German
research universities. Today, particularly in an era of mass higher
education, American and European universities share with our Chinese
colleagues many of the same challenges :

* How do we extend the promise of higher education while maintaining quality?

* How do we keep institutions from replicating themselves in academic
appointments, and how do we ensure that they will be open to talent
and ideas from all sources?

* How do we value teaching as well as research in an era in which
almost all of the rewards, professionally, are in research? In fact,
teaching can be beneficial to research : places with good students,
who are empowered to learn and to challenge the best faculty,
consistently outperform stand-alone think tanks and academies of
advanced study.

* How do we promote opportunity, by recruiting and funding the very
best students from all financial, geographic, and ethnic backgrounds;
and how do we ensure greater levels of access and fairness in the
admissions process?

* How do we ensure that colleges and universities have the capacity to
engage in what in China would be called self-criticism: to question
their organization and their curriculum? It is important that in every
generation we review what and how we teach; and that every generation
of faculty have the opportunity to define what it believes students
need to know in our time.

* How do we ensure that - even though our universities will still be
based in a home country, with national responsibilities - we also
fulfill our international responsibilities, training students who will
be citizens of the world?

Finally, beyond these concerns, we need always to ask : Why do we have
higher education at all? Here our debate goes back minimally to those
of the nineteenth century between proponents of the Humboldtian ideal
of Bildung (the education of the whole person) as distinct from Ubung
(more practical training), differences that we might phrase in Chinese
as being between a broad conception of jiaoyu and a narrower,
repetitive one oixunlian.

There is no one right answer for every time and place, but one
American tradition has been a commitment to the idea of liberal
education : educating the whole person, and not just training the
specialist. We want to ensure that our graduates are curious,
reflective, and skeptical learners : people with the capacity for
lifelong learning (as their first job will surely not be their last);
who can develop multiple perspectives on themselves and the world; and
of whom we can say, when they graduate, that they are truly
independent of mind. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, this ideal, which is of German origin, has become a
distinctive goal of an American undergraduate education.

We at Harvard have just renewed our commitment to this cornerstone of
undergraduate education. In the spring of 2007, the Harvard faculty
approved a new General Education curriculum for Harvard College, after
several years of drafting and seemingly endless discussion. When it
passed with near-unanimity, I reminded my colleagues of that 1924
debate in the Chinese Communist Party about joining the Nationalists
in the first United Front. The minutes of that meeting were recorded
thus : "The resolution passed unanimously, even though many comrades
were opposed." (I was also reminded of a conversation with the
president of a leading Chinese university. When I asked how his
faculty would vote on a set of proposed reforms, he responded:
"Vote?")

Even if decisions are taken in different ways, if activities at
Harvard and at leading Chinese universities are any guide, one
commitment we share is something that is counterintuitive in an age
increasingly dominated by science and technology and by pressures for
ever-earlier and ever-greater specialization. That is, our commitment,
or recommitment, to a general as well as a specialized education, and
to the humanities as part of the core of an undergraduate education.

It is worth noting that European universities appear to be adopting
some of the formal structures of perceived international models, such
as the U.S. baccalaureate. Many of the ideals of what has become known
as the Bologna Process have the promise in time of making higher
education in Europe a continental-wide enterprise, with mobility not
only of students but also of faculty and staff. That will be critical
in competing, and in cooperating, with continentalsized systems of
higher education in the United States and in China.

But while there is some emulation of the current American concept of
the baccalaureate, European universities appear less interested as yet
in the educational values that have defined the B.A. in many American
colleges, which stress a broad undergraduate education in the liberal
arts and sciences. If one looks at the documents of the Bologna,
Prague, Berlin, Bergen, and other meetings, there is enormous
attention paid to research, to funding, and to math, science, and
technology, and precious little to teaching, to citizenship, and to
valuing the broad and deep education of the next generation of
Europe's citizens. The "key competences" for lifelong learning
recommended by the European Parliament in 2006 quite appropriately
include language learning; information and communication technologies;
and math, science, and technology. But where are the humanities? Where
is the multidisciplinary study of other cultures and religions? Where
is education in moral reasoning and philosophy? Where, even, are the
'harder' social sciences?

There will be many further discussions of these issues, because the
quality of education is not one simply to be measured in technical or
vocational courses, nor in incomes earned in euros, dollars, or
renminbi. It is measured in people, and their ultimate contribution to
society.

What is encouraging about Chinese higher education today is the
independent understanding that the general education of China's
students - in the arts and humanities as well as the sciences and
social sciences - will be as important to their, and all of our,
futures, as will be their specialized, professional training. 'General
education' (tongshi jiaoyu) is now the cornerstone of curricular
reform in leading universities throughout the People's Republic, as
well as in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Thus, today, all Peking University
students, even in the Guanghua School of Management, have to take a
selection of courses that may include literature, philosophy, and
history. In addition, a focused liberal arts curriculum has been
established in the new Yuanpei Program, named for Peking University's
famous German-educated chancellor in the early twentieth century, the
philosopher Cai Yuanpei, who was an admirer of Wilhelm von Humboldt.

Chinese educational leaders, at least in the elite institutions,
believe that they need to do this, in part because, in China, as in
the United States, all the pressures are in the opposite direction :
on the part of students, who too singlemindedly pursue their careers,
and on the part of faculty, whose careers and interests are ever more
specialized leading to a situation in which students and faculty
interact on ever narrower ground.

It would be nice, as Henry Rosovsky, one of my predecessors as dean of
Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences once declared, if it were true
that precisely what the faculty wanted to teach was exactly what the
students needed to learn. But that has never been the case, and it is
the job of universities to ensure that our students learn broadly,
from the best faculty, how to think, reflect, and analyze, and that
they become the critical thinkers and problem solvers of the next
generation.

For this, a study of the humanities is essential. China's educational
leaders increasingly share this view. Perhaps this is because they
know, better than anyone else, what life can be like in the absence of
the humanities, and in the absence of a liberal education. For that is
part of the history of China's twentieth century.

What happened in China in the past century is all the more remarkable
because China is the world's longest continuous civilization, with the
longest continuing sets of philosophical and literary traditions. The
study of that tradition defined not only what it meant to be a
scholar, but also what it meant to be powerful. The Qing educational
and examination system brought the most learned men in the realm into
the service of the state - not because they had been trained in
statecraft or tax collection, but because they had deeply studied what
we would today call the 'humanities' : because they had studied,
memorized, chanted, and metaphorically consumed the classics, and they
would, in office, act according to the principles of human behavior
that the Analects, Mencius, and other great works set out.

There has seldom been a higher academic ideal : good people embarking
on the living study of great books in order to do good work in
society. (In the United States we sometimes have trouble imagining a
society where the best people go into government.)

This was the ideal, of course never fully realized in practice, and
the ordeal of studying to be a scholar-official was a tortuous one.
And there were limits to this system : the absence of the study of
mathematics, of science, of practical affairs, did not mean that the
Empire was thereby better governed. Their absence arguably contributed
to the Empire's feeble capacity, in the nineteenth century, to respond
to a militarized, industrialized, and otherwise energized West, in a
series of humiliations that would spell the end of a
two-thousandyear-old imperial tradition. The Qing fell in 1911, but
for our purposes the more important date is 1905, when the ancient
examination system was ended overnight, and not replaced. From that
date - and particularly under Republican and Communist regimes China
would be governed not by a civil service chosen for its proven
capacities in moral reasoning, but largely by exemplars of that most
dominant and successful Western export - the modern, professional
military - in the direct service of another Western export that would
not be particularly sympathetic to humanist discourse - the Leninist
state.

From 1905, for understandable reasons, Chinese education at all levels
would begin to drift strongly toward the study of those subjects that
would bring about a return to fu qiang ('wealth and power') -
primarily mathematics, science, and engineering. Within a decade of
that date, the moral foundation of both Chinese government and
culture, Confucianism, would come under a withering attack, leaving a
void in the realm of human and social values. By 1949, when the
mainland fell to the Communists, less than 10 percent of graduates of
Chinese public universities graduated with degrees in humanistic
disciplines. The Communists then took that number to the vanishing
point.

In the absence of the humanities, there were arguably two dominant
themes in education. One, by no means limited to China, was the belief
that in an age science one could quite literally engineer a bright
future, a new people. This was the dream of Chinese leaders from Sun
Yatsen onward : a government of technocratic expertise, capable of
'reconstructing' China with roads, railroads, and dams - a government
of huge ambition, as seen in the Three Gorges Dam project, first
conceived by Sun Yatsen in the 1920s, and now built by the governments
of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Today, every recent member of the
Standing Committee of the Politburo of the People's Republic of China
- the nine or more men who run the country - has training in
engineering. The term, 'technocracy' has been translated into Chinese
as 'the dictatorship of the engineers.' There is perhaps no more
fitting description of the contemporary government of the People's
Republic. Of all the world's governments in the early twenty-first
century, only China's has the engineering imagination, political will,
and financial resources to complete a project of this scale and to
relocate inhabitants in its way. This and other great infrastructure
projects - highways, subways, airports, and more, on a scale unmatched
anywhere - are the result of an engineering state unleashed and
unchecked.

A second belief of the twentieth century was that 'culture' and the
arts were to be firmly subordinated to the purposes of the
developmental state. Under Chiang Kai-shek's New Life Movement and Mao
Zedong's Cultural Revolution, the humanities were mobilized for the
purposes of the state. As Mao Zedong put it, literature and art were
to be defined as "the artistic crystallization of the political
aspirations of the Communist party." (As the twentieth-century writer
Lu Xun once observed: all art may be propaganda, but not all
propaganda is art.)

Chinese history in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century
shows what dislocation can ensue when a civilization loses its
cultural foundations, its moral compass, on a relentless quest for
wealth and power. In that quest, China imported all sorts of Western
'isms': scientism, militarism, Leninism, chief among them; and it
denigrated nearly every aspect of a civilization that, just a century
earlier, was the most sophisticated and accomplished on Earth.

Today, a more self-confident China is beginning to explore its past
and make that past part of its modern education. There are many signs
of a new cultural pluralism in contemporary China, and of a
willingness to imagine and build institutions of learning that are at
the forefront of science and technology and yet also honor and promote
the humanities. Surely it is a positive sign that statues of Confucius
are replacing statues of Mao - even though their works may still be
equally unread.

Perhaps the most important revolution in Chinese higher education
today will not be its size and scope, but the fact that, even under
the leadership of engineers, leading institutions have come to
understand that an education without the humanities is incomplete.
This is a recognition that in an age still, perhaps necessarily,
consumed with 'wealth and power,' that as countries vie for power and
individuals seek to accumulate wealth, an education that stresses the
values that make for a strong, and even harmonious, human community
are more important than ever.

Just weeks before he was assassinated, President John F. Kennedy
captured the essence of the humanities in a speech at Amherst College.
He spoke about poetry, but his idea applies to all the creative
disciplines:

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his
limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concerns, poetry
reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power
corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths
which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.

In addressing the challenges facing higher education in China, Europe,
and the United States in this era of reform and renewal, I mean to
speak of our collective human experience. After all, as the Chinese
phrase shu tu tonggui reminds us : "We have myriad paths, but our ends
are one."

1 This essay is based on lectures presented at the University of
Vienna; the Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party,
Beijing; the University of Hong Kong; National Taiwan University;
Washington University; and the University of California at Berkeley.
This work is supported by the Lee and Tuliet Folger Fund.

William C. Kirby, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2005, is T.
M. Chang Professor of China Studies and Spangler Family Professor of
Business Administration at Harvard University. He directs Harvard's
Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and served as Dean of the Faculty
of Arts and Sciences from 2002 to 2006. His recent work includes three
edited volumes : "Realms of Freedom in Modern China" (2004), "The
Normalization of U.S. -China Relations" (2005), and "Global
Conjectures: China in Transnational Perspective" (2006).

Copyright MIT Press Summer 2008

(c) 2008 Daedalus. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.

Source: Daedalus